


from the realm of forgotten things

by Alchemine



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Gen, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 11:42:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13053309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alchemine/pseuds/Alchemine
Summary: This much is known: In the summer of 1958, seven children drive IT into its stinking lair underneath the city of Derry, Maine. Twenty-seven years later, they return to finish the job. In between lies not so much a blank space, filled as it is with college and careers, travel and marriages, but a time empty of memory, in which IT might as well not exist....except.





	from the realm of forgotten things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ninety6tears](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninety6tears/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!

This much is known: In the summer of 1958, seven children drive IT into its stinking lair underneath the city of Derry, Maine. Twenty-seven years later, they return to finish the job. In between lies not so much a blank space, filled as it is with college and careers, travel and marriages, but a time empty of memory, in which IT might as well not exist.

... _except_.

Except that there are moments, _hiccups,_  one might say, when the past slips through. Perhaps these hiccups are a side effect of IT rolling over in its long, dark dream, like a restless sleeper on a hot night. Or they may be the Turtle sending out a message—slowly, the way a turtle does everything—to remind the children-turned-adults that their work is not yet done.

These details are not part of the body of knowledge.

What is also known, however, is that on this July evening in 1975 (the seventeenth anniversary of Patrick Hockstetter’s death, though only one member of the erstwhile Losers’ Club can currently remember that a boy named Patrick Hockstetter ever existed), the universe is gearing up to deliver one of these hiccups to seven recipients, now spread out across thousands of miles, but still linked by the long-ago clasp of their hands. 

 **I. Richie**  
  
In California, it’s only ten p.m., the night is young, and Richie Tozier is in a restaurant, tripping balls on psychedelic mushrooms. From the street it looks like an ordinary restaurant, and if you’re a tourist who wanders in at random on a Thursday night, that’s exactly what it is: you can order a plate of spaghetti, have a nice meal, and leave none the wiser. If you’re a customer like Richie Tozier, on the other hand, you can ask for the "special menu" and get completely fucked up on a variety of substances, including psilocybin, long before it’s time for coffee and dessert.

Richie is not really a fan of mushrooms—anything hallucinogenic makes him uneasy, for reasons he can’t quite explain—but Lindy, the girl he’s with, has heard about this place and asked to come, and Richie is nothing if not an obliging date. So here they are, at a table in the private room where special-menu customers sit, and Lindy, who has polished off three-quarters of a mushroom-topped pizza and is even higher than Richie, is giggling and reaching for something in the air that only she can see. Richie asks her what it is, and she says something about bubbles, but her voice is coming from so far away that it’s as if she’s at the other end of a tunnel instead of just across the table.

 _Bubbles_ , she says again, and then Richie’s heart nearly stutters to a halt because now he can see them too, but they’re not bubbles. They’re _balloons_ , dozens upon dozens of red helium balloons filling the room, bobbing on the ceiling, drifting past the other diners, and he doesn’t know why balloons should frighten him so badly, but they do, God, they do.

 _They float_ , he says, and Lindy laughs, delighted, and says _They do! They float, Richie!_

 _They float_ , Richie says again, and starts to scream.

 

 **II. Ben**  
  
While Richie is screaming his lungs out in a Los Angeles restaurant (and then being discreetly whisked out through a rear exit by the staff, who have dealt with this sort of thing many times before), Ben Hanscom is fifteen hundred miles away in Omaha, on the verge of falling asleep.

He’s not always in bed by midnight—when he’s consumed with work, he often stays up until four or five in the morning—but he’s between projects at the moment and is trying to look after himself a bit better. He’s only twenty-eight, not even within calling distance of middle age yet, but he’s already beginning to notice the first subtle fading of his youth: it takes him longer to bounce back from a cold or a sprained ankle, now, and when he pulls an all-nighter, he feels it the next day, coffee or no coffee.

Better rest while he can, he thinks, and closes his eyes…

...and dreams of summer, not the boiling-hot Nebraska summer that’s seething outside his window at this very moment, but a cooler, wetter summer from the past. Even in the dream, he knows it’s the distant past because he's wearing the shape of his childhood, larger and heavier, shorter of breath, but somehow never truly clumsy for all that.

Yes, it’s summer and he’s walking with his friends, walking down, down into a wild green place, and he is terribly afraid of something  _(IT)_ that may be hiding and watching, and yet at the same time he feels safe with the strength of numbers. Just ahead of him is a girl, a tall, beautiful girl with red hair that is set aflame every time they pass through a patch of sun; he watches her set each foot down elegantly and precisely on the dirt path, and thinks that he would give his life for her.

He only wishes he could remember her name.

 

 **III. Beverly**  
  
A bit farther east, in Chicago, the red-haired girl herself is well and truly asleep, having spent a long, sweaty day cutting and pinning fabric to fit mannequins, and then most of the evening sketching her own designs, a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. She’s recently broken up with a boyfriend who committed the cardinal sin of telling her that he was worried about her (and who is still baffled by the visceral, almost violent reaction it caused) so for now she sleeps alone, and mostly in peace.

She will not meet Tom Rogan for another six years.

At this stage of her life, Beverly is one of those people who rarely remember their dreams, although she knows she must have them; she remembers her psychology professor in college explaining that people who don’t dream eventually go bugshit, and as far as she can tell, she hasn’t lost it yet. She doesn’t think anyone who grew up in Al Marsh’s house is likely to go around the bend that easily.

As it happens, though, she does dream every night, and is doing so right now; a dream that is similar to Ben’s, but not quite the same. In it, she’s a young girl with a group of friends whose names she doesn’t know, but whose faces are wonderfully, achingly familiar to her, like beloved characters in scenes from a movie about someone else’s idyllic childhood.

_She’s sitting on the grass under a tree and drinking a frappé from a soda fountain, the kind of place you can hardly find anymore even in a big city like Chicago, and when you do nothing tastes the way you remember it._

_She’s playing a game with toy guns in a swampy wooded area, running through brambles and branches, getting scratched and scraped and feeling utterly free._

_She’s standing in a circle, holding hands with her friends to make some sort of promise, and they’re all as solemn as if someone has died, even though all of them are there together._

Even though this is only a dream, she feels a lurking sense of guilt, because all of her friends are boys, and she knows what will happen if her father finds out she’s been playing with them; what her father will _think_ , what her father will _assume_. It isn’t fair. She loves them, but not like that—well, maybe a little like that, but is that anyone’s business but her own?

 _You won’t take them away from me, Daddy_ , she thinks in the dream, _I won’t let you_ , and in the waking world her lips shape the words soundlessly, twice, three times, before the hiccup passes and she sinks deeper into sleep.  
 

 **IV. Stan**  
  
Dipping down now to the South, even hotter and steamier in July than Ben’s home in Nebraska or Beverly’s in Chicago, we find Stanley Uris, bright, up-and-coming young accountant, who has just woken up shaking and weeping from a dream he refuses to discuss with his wife. Patty strokes his hair, rubs his sweat-slick bare shoulder, and pleads with him to tell her what it is, what's the matter, but all Stan will say, over and over, is _I can’t remember_.

This is not entirely accurate. Stan loves Patty, but he lies to her sometimes to protect her, and at some level he thinks she knows and accepts it. He wants to tell her the truth this time, but the strangeness of the few dream-fragments he can recall—a black cloud of birds’ wings, children's echoing voices, water dripping in the dark—frightens him so badly that he thinks it will frighten her too, and so he repeats _I don't remember_ , and says nothing more.

Even as a boy, Stanley was always good at keeping his own counsel.  
 

 **V. Eddie**  
  
As Stan lights a cigarette and tells his wife to go back to sleep, Eddie Kaspbrak lies tucked up in bed with a thick coating of Vicks Vapo-Rub on his chest and warm socks on his skinny feet to avoid catching a chill, even though the temperature in Boston has barely dipped under seventy degrees. You can’t be too careful, even in the summer.

In addition to his nightly array of vitamins, this evening Eddie has taken a sleeping pill because Myra, God love her, is a heavy snorer, and Eddie needs a full night’s rest so he can get up early for work and not fall asleep at the wheel. The pill has pushed him down into a deep, heavy state of unconsciousness, and so Eddie is the only former Loser to escape the effects of the hiccup almost completely, merely stirring and rolling over in his sleep, mumbling something incoherent, as it passes by.

In the morning he will feel anxious and uneasy for no reason, but will mistake it for his usual free-floating anxiety and unease, and think nothing more of it after his first cup of coffee. It's just as well. 

 **VI. Bill**  
  
Somewhat north of Eddie is Bill, who not long ago would have been in Hollywood near Richie (not that he remembers Richie), is spending the summer in New York City, guest-lecturing for a writing course at NYU. He and Audra have only been married a few months, and he didn’t like leaving her to come here, but she pointed out, correctly, that it was a good opportunity, and that given their careers they would have to accept being apart at least some of the time. So he’s here, subletting an apartment over a Russian deli in the East Village—" _de rigueur_ for a writer, don’t you know,” he told Audra wryly over the phone—and trying to work on his next book when he isn’t speaking to students, a task he finds delightfully ironic after his own college creative writing experiences.

Earlier in the evening, he put in a solid four hours on the book while eating what felt like his five thousandth takeout meal from the deli, and then went to bed with herring and sour cream still lying heavily on his stomach. Later he will chalk the dream up to too much fish before bedtime and switch to potato pancakes instead, but right now he’s in the midst of it, twitching and moaning slightly in his sleep, a fine sheen of sweat on his already-balding head.

He’s dreaming about Georgie, and unlike the dreams of the other Losers, it’s not a complete mystery, because he does remember vaguely that he once had a brother called George, although only as a meaningless name written on the backs of yellowing photographs. They’re in his old room together, back in the house in Derry that he also recalls mainly from pictures, and Georgie’s small, hot hand is on Bill’s denim-clad knee.

 _Will you help me, Bill_? Georgie asks.

 _I want to_ , Bill says, _but I don’t know how_.

 _You’ll know when the time comes_ , Georgie says, and then Bill looks down and sees that the hand on his knee is the only hand his brother has, and wakes up gasping in the stifling dark.  
 

 **VII. Mike**  
  
In the end everything comes back to Derry, and so do we.

Back to Derry, and to Mike Hanlon, the last member of the Losers’ Club in every way: not only the last to join, but also the last one to carry on the Losers’ good work, a man who has lived the last seventeen years directly over the beast’s lair and is already showing the signs of strain in weary eyes and prematurely greying hair. He’s sitting up in bed and writing in his journal by the dim yellow light of the lamp on his bedside table, and when the hiccup comes, he feels it not as a memory or a dream, but as a physical jolt that makes him drop his pen with a short, sharp cry.

He pushes himself away from the headboard of his bed, wide-eyed, thinking _Did something happen? Oh Jesus, is it time? It’s too early…_

But the feeling subsides and he subsides with it, sinking back onto his supporting pillows and fumbling for the pen among the bedclothes. Like Eddie, Mike has been afraid so deeply and for so long that he barely notices it as anything other than the background music of his life, but there are two things that frighten him more than others.

One of them is having to summon his old friends to come home.

The other is waiting too long to do it.

 


End file.
